What's the proudest moment of your life? Getting your dream job? Gazing upon the face of your newborn child with such an unconditional sense of love and wonder that your heart might literally burst inside your chest? Rescuing a cat from a fire? Boring. That's not special. Hundreds of people do that stuff every day. My proudest moment? Now that's special. I stand alone, unique in my fearlessness. For I, Stuart Heritage, have deleted Candy Crush Saga from my phone.

I'm pretty sure that I'm the only person in history to have done this. I must be. Candy Crush Saga has just been named the planet's most popular gaming app. It's a phenomenon. More than 500 million people downloaded it last year. It reportedly makes its creators half a million pounds every single day. It's barely even a game any more. It's a brand, advertised on television alongside yoghurt and pessaries. People all around you are playing it right now. If you throw a shoe on any bus, anywhere in the country, chances are you'll hit someone playing Candy Crush Saga. And they won't even flinch, because they'll be playing Candy Crush Saga.

In case you're fortunate enough to have never played it, Candy Crush is essentially a game where you organise rows of confectionery over and over again, for no reason, for hours at a time, until you reach the point where it burns itself into your retinas and all you can see whenever you look at anything are hundreds and hundreds of brightly coloured sweets dancing around in front of you, taunting you with their disorganised clutter, forever taunting you, you colossal disappointment. You can't even organise sweets into rows; no wonder your mother wanted a daughter. It's quite addictive.

But who am I kidding? Everyone knows that; 500 million people have downloaded it. You're probably one of them. You're part of a half-billion strong army, all ignoring your families and weaving haphazardly across pavements and extravagantly missing the toilet with your urine streams because you're trying to get one peardrop to go next to another peardrop with your thumb. Half a billion grotty husks, yellow-eyed and dirty, all spamming your semi-estranged Facebook acquaintances in exchange for a free turn. I was part of this army once, and I understand your pain.

Candy Crush Saga's appeal is its simplicity. To play a modern console game these days is to commit to days of wearisome acquiescence to complicated contextual control systems and endless submenus and emotional toil and, in all likelihood, an interminable scene two thirds of the way through where the main character gets drugged, then everything goes blurry and he has a tedious epiphany about his childhood.

That's not the case with Candy Crush Saga. It grips you faster than other games because you know exactly how to play it right from the word go. It's all primary colours and woozy music. And unlike Angry Birds, where you deal in the fairly morally iffy act of murdering hundreds of pigs for fun, this is all about constant positive reinforcement. There's even a man who shouts "Great!" whenever you do anything, for crying out loud. "Hey, he thinks I'm great!" you think to yourself 10 seconds in. "Maybe he'll think I'm great at level two as well." And then you look up and it's Thursday and you've been sacked and your wife has left you and you realise that you've subconsciously taken to licking your own tear-streaked face for sustenance.

Listen, I've been there. I know. I have pointlessly run down my phone's battery half an hour into a four-hour journey. I have spent hours falsely promising that the next level will be my last. I've spent weeks irrationally hating jelly. I know how joylessly repetitive Candy Crush addiction can get, and how powerless you are to stop it. I'm here today to tell you that it's OK. There is an end in sight.

I remember when I decided to delete Candy Crush. I'd been plugging away at it for weeks, venturing through Candy Town, across Lemonade Lake and into the grand and mysterious Peppermint Palace. And then it hit me – this game doesn't stop. Whenever it looks like you're about to finish, another 15 levels get magically tacked on. Candy Crush is a journey without a destination. It's like Space Invaders or Pac-Man, in that you're expected to keep playing until you die. Except you can't die in Candy Crush, so you're expected to keep playing until you've either develop RSI or impoverish yourself with endless 69p micropayments. Enough was enough, I thought. Click. Gone. And suddenly I had my life back.

It took courage to delete Candy Crush, because at that point it was like deleting a part of myself. But I did it. It was beautiful. And you can do it too. Suddenly you'll be paying attention to things again. Things that aren't coloured dots on a tiny rectangle 4in from your face. You'll be able to see things, smell things, experience things. And, trust me, deleting Candy Crush means that you'll have loads more time to play Flappy Bird on your phone. No, you're the one with the problem. Shut up.